Feds investigate the Livoti three

June 29, 1998

Now that Francis X. Livoti has been found guilty
in federal court of violating Anthony Baez' civil rights, police department
spokeswoman Marilyn Mode says the feds are going after the cops who testified
for him on perjury charges.

That looks like the Livoti Three - Sgt. William Monahan
and Officers Mario Erotokritou and Anthony Farnam. Each testified Livoti
never used a chokehold on Baez. After they and Livoti wrestled him to
the ground and handcuffed him, they testified that Baez even stood up
and walked a couple of feet before fatally collapsing.

If what they said is true, Livoti's chokehold couldn't
have killed him.

Their testimony, however, was refuted by two other
cops, Robert Ball and Erotokritou's partner, Daisy Boria. Both testified
that after they saw Baez on the ground - face-down, cuffed and Livoti
straddling him, as Ball put it. Baez never stood up again.

When Ball attempted to lift him, he couldn't do it.

But then Ball apparently deviated from the script.
Asked why he couldn't lift Baez, he testified, "To me it felt that
he was holding his weight down."

Well, if that's true, Baez was indeed alive after
Livoti's chokehold.

Asked to explain this apparent discrepancy from the
government's own witness, Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Pomerantz said
outside court, "That was the gloss he (Ball) put on it to try and
help Livoti."

At least to this reporter, it's not clear where "gloss"
ends and lying begins.

Perhaps a more fruitful - or at least a more unequivocal
- area for perjury is The Livoti Three's tale of the mysterious black
man who happened on the scene of Baez' arrest, then dissolved into the
night after his bodiless black hands were seen in the vicinity of Baez'
neck. Implication: It was the mysterious black man - not Livoti - who
choked Baez.

Preposterous as this story sounds, that's just how
The Livoti Three testified in the 1996 trial in the Bronx. That's the
trial in which Acting State Supreme Court Justice Gerald Sheindlin acquitted
Livoti of killing Baez and described the cops' conflicting testimony as
"a terrible conflict" and a "nest of perjury." Sheindlin
never identified the nesters other than to say he meant more than one
cop.

Last week in Manhattan federal court, those same bodiless
black hands materialized again, though this time, The Livoti Three placed
them not near Baez' neck but closer to his lower extremities. This time
around, Erotokritou actually testified about the mysterious man: "I'd
seen him before. I knew him."

If this wasn't incredible enough, his partner Boria
(now, for obvious reasons, his ex-partner) refuted his testimony, telling
prosecutors that Erotokritou had invited her to a midnight soiree in the
parking lot of the 46th Precinct. There, Boria said, according to federal
prosecutors, the cops decided they "were going to say that a civilian
with black hands choked Anthony Baez."

In
his summation, Livoti's Patrolmen's Benevolent Association attorney Stuart
London (Livoti was a union delegate) suggested Boria may have lied because
of a distant relationship with the Baez family or because she was angry
with the department over sexual harassment allegations she had made in
a suit filed against the department.

He did not inquire into her 1987 indictment for perjury
by Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau over an insurance fraud
scam before she became a cop. She was acquitted.

Dandy Andy. Say
what you will about the Bronx District Attorney's office and the manner
in which it handled - or mishandled - the Baez case, what are we to make
of Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Dember's suggestion that Bronx prosecutors
conspired to protect Livoti?

Dember charged that Livoti's fellow cops engaged
in a conspiracy, citing the fact that none gave a statement to the Police
Department for two years while omitting the fact that giving such statements
would have required immunizing the cops from prosecution - something Bronx
prosecutors naturally refused to do.

Dember next mentioned the cops' meeting together
with their attorneys in the PBA offices after Baez' death, then tossed
in the fact that the same cops met together with the Assistant Bronx District
Attorney who prosecuted Livoti.

The prosecutor, Nancy Borko, used the cops as witnesses
against Livoti, though their testimony did little to help her case.

"We did it to rule them out as suspects,"
explained Steven Reed, a spokesman for the Bronx district attorney, last
week, "because there was a concern Livoti would try to put the blame
on one of them for Baez' death."